On May 15th, 1999, a unknown startup founded in 1998 and called VMware launched its first product on an empty virtualization market: VMware for Linux 1.0.
The company was founded by Diane Greene (now President and CEO), Mendel Rosenblum (now Chief Scientist), Scott Devine (now Principal Engineer), Edward Wang (now Principal Engineer) and Edouard Bugnion (now CTO at Nuova Systems, funded and soon to be acquired by Cisco).
Along with these five, another five composed the original ten persons group which started to change forever the way we think, design and implement our IT infrastructures: Jeremy, Patrick, Beng, VJ and Reza.
The virtualization market they created is now populated by tens of vendors, hundreds of resellers and thousands of customers worldwide.
The virtualization technologies that they delivered have the brightest perspective to grow and become the fundamental brick of every computing architecture in the coming years.
In these last ten years VMware hit several milestones, bringing virtualization to new markets through a plethora of products, spreading the knowledge and confidence in the technology thought free tools, demonstrating the absolute value of the innovation through the EMC acquisition and one of the most impressive tech IPO in the stock market history.
Happy Birthday VMware!
Thanks to an anonymous for the news and to the Linux Journal for the image.